ASRock 890FX Deluxe: Comprehensive Motherboard Review & Investigation of Thuban Performance Scaling

We now follow up with our usual system evaluation suit to test ASRock 890FX Deluxe 4 and pit it against ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 .  For this part of the test, we enabled all the power-saving features of our 1090T and Turbo Core, and Windows power plan was set to “Balanced”.  We matched the 4x2GB of Corsair XMS3 sticks to DDR3-1600/7-8-7-1T on both boards using 3:12 (1:4) divider.  All games were tested at their maximum graphics quality settings available in-game.  Anti-aliasing was set to 4xAA when applicable, and anisotropic filtering was set to 16xAF in Catalyst Control Panel. 

Application Performance - WinRAR 3.90 64-bit

This benchmark compresses our AT workload consisting of a main folder that contains 954MB of files in 15 subfolders. The result is a file approximately 829MB in size.

Application Performance - Bibble 5.0

We utilize Bibble Labs’ Bibble 5 v2 to convert 50 RAW image files into full size JPEG images with the program’s default settings. This program is fully multithreaded and multi-core aware.

Application Performance - Sorenson Squeeze 6.0

We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites. This application heavily favors physical core count and processor clock speed.

Gaming Performance - Resident Evil 5

We are using the built-in benchmark utility of Capcom's highly addictive horror game.

Gaming Performance - StarCraft 2

We use the same replay file we used in part 1, but the numbers are slightly different because here our setups are devised more closely to match actual user experience.  Keep in mind that Turbo Core is enabled and memory configuration is different for this part of the test.  16AF is forced from Catalyst Control Center.

USB 3.0 Performance

We use Acronis TrueImage Home (v. 10) to make a backup of our installation drive to an external SATA 3.0 Gbps drive via USB 3.0 and compare it with USB 2.0 and SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers.  The total data backed up is approximately 20 GB.  We could not complete the backup on the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 in a consistent manner.